Monthly Archives: April 2015

This morning, I tuned into Stephano streaming Legacy of the Void. Simply, I was blown away. I have watched various streamers over the past 2 weeks, and most of them are still working out through new units and strategies. Even if he hasn’t solidified his builds, Stephano played with the decisiveness in engagements and ease of micro that made him an instant success in Wings of Liberty, and it was a tremendous pleasure to watch. I watched him play 3 ZvT and 1 ZvZ games, so let’s dive into some analysis about what he did.

Most streamers are trying new, fancy things in LotV. Openings are adapting for the economy changes. New units are everywhere. Not Apollo. Apollo knows HotS builds, and he’s using HotS strategies. And they seem to work, more or less. It might not be the most innovative StarCraft play, but this is really helpful for us because it helps us compare timings from old HotS builds versus LotV builds.

We have some writeups from his past tutorials, though the most useful one is probably his Terran in HotS. Here’s an example build he used in TvT. It is a very standard Reaper Expand into Starport

There are a few differences we have to account for between HotS and LotV builds:

1. Supply counts are about +4 from before. This begins with the Supply Depot going down at 14 instead of 10 and continues forward. This, of course, affects the minerals available, but most builds are timed out based on the tech tree, not minerals, so it works out

2. Times start about 40 seconds earlier. Because of the increase from 6 to 12 starting workers, builds start earlier. Use this as a delta on your builds.

3. The game clock is faster by a factor of ~1.4. Legacy of the Void has blessed us with a game clock that is the same as real-time, so your 15 minute game actually takes 15 minutes, not 11 minutes.

These changes lead to the build adjustment formula for HotS Terran builds to LotV Protoss builds, which I will coin as “Apollo’s First Law of Void”

LotV = (HotS – 40) / 1.4

By the way, Apollo crushed ForGG in that game. My rough analysis is that Cyclones are good in small numbers, but they aren’t a backbone to a Mech army, because mass Marines work pretty well.

Tune into Apollo’s stream if you get a chance. He’s a great player to learn from.

Legacy of the Void (LotV) replays can now be parsed and viewed at http://lotv.spawningtool.com/! Big thanks are in order to Blizzard and Graylin for getting this issued so quickly. Just like LotV itself, the build is unstable and requires a lot of testing, but in principle, we can see what’s going on in the game.

In terms of our knowledge of the game, the biggest obstacle at the moment is that we actually haven’t really converged on any terminology or builds, so it’s a little tricky to know how to label the replays properly. That, however, is part of the excitement of the beta, and I’m looking forward to refining our taxonomy over time.

The biggest obstacle, however, is just sample size! If you have any LotV replays at all, please upload them or email them to us at spawningtool@gmail.com. We want to get as much into the system as possible. So far, the biggest dump just came out of the Lycan LotV Beta Tournament held earlier today. Big props to them for organizing something out of the gate and showing how exciting the game can be.

One more thing: if you see any interesting builds or strategies that you want us to do a writeup of, please let us know where you saw it, or better yet, send us a replay! We are looking to do some analyses of build orders and to really dig into this game.